5 Detective Novels Magazine — page 117: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

COMPLIMENTS OF A FIEND with them from a few minutes after I’d found it until I’d left with the sheriff and we’d driven right to the spot in his car. But Karl Pogue— The more! thought of it, the more I liked Karl Pogue as a suspect. He could be mad himself. Or Emp could have turned killer and Karl could have— I glanced at my wrist-watch and it was nine o’clock. I’d have to leave right away to have time to walk to Reeder’s home without hurrying. The Otis busi- ness could wait until tomorrow. I’d have to clear my mind to concentrate on the job at hand—tthe radio matter. I walked briskly and succeeded in for- getting werewolves while I was on the streets of Haverton. Then the edge of town and the dimly moonlit road. And I’d forgotten my flashlight. Things are different at night on a country road. You can sit in a brightly lighted hotel room and think objectively about madmen and mad dogs and were- wolves. Alone on a dark road on which a man has had his throat torn out you think about them, too, but your thoughts don’t fall into orderly grooves of reason- ing; they breathe on the back of your neck. They gibber at you from every dark clump of bushes and every fence corner. It didn’t help, either, when I reached down to pick up a stick of wood beside the road. The stick of wood slithered away quickly. It wasn’t one. I WAS opposite the woods now, and had a quarter of a mile of it to pass, until I got to the other side of Karl Pogue’s place. Karl’s farm is on one side of the road there, the woods on the other. Karl was in bed already; his place was dark. Emp started barking when he heard my footsteps on the road. I didn’t mind that. The barking of a dog is a homely, familiar sound. And a barking dog may or may not bite, but he is seldom a killer. Anyway he was chained up. I could hear the scrape of the chain. That sound made me breathe a bit easier. But then my theory about Emp and Karl must be a dud—Emp, anyway. Karl was still the best bet for a student in the school of lycanthropy although, of 117 course, I didn’t know all the people liv- ing around Haverton, by any means. - The barking stopped behind me. The woods were behind now, too. Nothing had come out of them. Now I was pass- ing the cornfield. Beyond it a clump of elms overhung the road, under them a patch of shadow darker than the rest of the night. But it was only shadow; there was nothing there. Except— Yes, now that I was only a few paces away, I saw something lying there in the road that seemed to glow faintly. It looked as though it might be the luminous dial of a watch. It was a watch, lying there in the road. As I bent over it I could hear it ticking and I could see that the hands were at nine twenty-five. I reached down quickly to pick it up, and— Vil ie lying somewhere where it was very dark. My hands and face seemed to be sticky with mud. My legs weren’t there. My head was a balloon that in- flated and deflated with every breath I took. I was outdoors, for I seemed to be lying on grass and there was an occa- sional breath of cool wind. But some- body had put out the moon—or else I was blindfolded or blind. That last thought gave me courage to move. My hands weren’t tied and my right one felt of my left wrist and my wrist-watch was still there. I got my left wrist up in front of my face and could see the glowing figures of the dial. I wasn’t blind. W atch—luminous dial—I’d been reaching for a watch lying in the road and that was the last thing I’d known until now. What had happened? Where was I? I made my eyes focus on those faintly glowing figures and on the hands. The small hand pointed to ten and the long to eleven. Five minutes to ten o’clock. I’d been unconscious for half an hour. Somewhere not far away I heard the sound of an automobile stopping and a car door opening and closing. Low- pitched male voices. My legs were coming back now, and MICLOOOKS (CO)